Fedora Weekly News Issue 207

Issue Summary

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 207[1] for the week ending December 20, 2009. What follows are some highlights from this issue.

Welcome to the final Fedora Weekly News of 2009! We will be taking a break after this issue and return with issue 208 on January 11, 2010. Have a wonderful holiday season how ever you celebrate it! In this issue, we kick off with announcements including a reminder of Fedora 10 end of life, FESCo election results, and notification of Fedora mailing lists migration. In news from the Fedora Planet, several posts covering FUDCon Toronto, a continuation of the Plymouth Theming Guide, and details on the source control move from cvs to git, as well as several posts around virtualization. In Quality Assurance news, a recap of the weekly QA team meetings, increasing grub timeout, and X.org server testing. Our issue finishes with Security Advisories for Fedora 11 and 12. We hope you enjoy FWN 207!

If you are interested in contributing to Fedora Weekly News, please see our 'join' page[2]. We welcome reader feedback: fedora-news-list@redhat.com

Fedora Mailing lists migration

"Over the last several years, there has been some contention about
having Fedora mailing lists hosted on Red Hat infrastructure. As
previously announced[2], there was an effort to migrate the mailing
lists onto Fedora infrastructure, however, due to a variety of
factors, it has been very much delayed.

I'm pleased to announce that we've selected a date(s) for this
migration project, and are ready to implement it. On January 9 and 10,
2010, all Fedora related mailing lists that are currently hosted at
redhat.com will be migrated to lists.fedoraproject.org. Red Hat has
agreed to forward the mail for the old list name to the new list
names, and continue hosting the archives at their current location.
Additionally, all archives will be copied over to the new location as
well. All new archives will only be present at the new location.

We've decided to do this in one fell swoop rather than gradually as
originally planned because we feel it to be in the interest of our
community to have much pain at one point, rather than small amounts of
pain spread out over a long period of time. All of your mail filters
that rely on the List-ID header will break on these days, and
adjustments on your part will be required. We apologize for the
inconvenience. For your convenience, I've posted a mapping of old
list names to new list names[3] as well as a PDF version[4]

After the migration, you are welcome to file tickets for new mailing
list creation and problems with old ones in the Fedora Infrastructure
trac instance[5].

Omega (Boxer) Fedora Remix

"Omega is a completely free and open source Linux based operating system
and a Fedora remix suitable for desktop and laptop users. It is a
installable Live image for regular PC (i686 architecture) systems. It
has all the features of Fedora and number of additional software
including multimedia players and codecs by default. Omega plays any
multimedia content (including MP3) or commercial DVD's out of the box.
It also has the full Openoffice.org office suite plus extra utilities
and games.

Omega (Boxer) release is a remix of Fedora 12 and includes all the
updates till Monday 14th of December 2009 from Fedora, RPM Fusion and
Livna repositories. Adobe repository is also enabled by default for
convenience but no software is installed from that repository by default.

It is a 1.3 GB Live image and you can simply use dd in Linux or the
cross platform Fedora Live USB creator to create a Live USB.

There are 29 questions, most of the yes/no variety; the survey takes less than 5 minutes to complete (I just timed myself). A special thanks to Robyn Bergeron, Yaakov Nemoy, and the rest of the Fedora Marketing team for designing the survey so it *can* be completed in less than 5 minutes!

Questions are previewable[4]. The survey will be active from 12/16/2009 through 1/8/2010, and we'll be analyzing and announcing the results shortly after it closes. If you're curious about the
process, interested in helping us analyze the results, or have any questions in general, join the conversation on the Fedora Marketing mailing list[5]."

Reason for Outage:
We have a lot of temporary solutions in place from the move, we're moving things back to their more permanent solutions. The main outages won't last the full two hours. The vpn setup should only takes 10-20 minutes. The db1 migration will take at least an hour though.

Contact Information:
Please join #fedora-admin in irc.freenode.net or respond to this email to
trackthe status of this outage."

FEDORA EVENTS

Fedora events are the source of marketing, learning and meeting all the fellow community people around you. So, please mark your agenda with the following events to consider attending or volunteering near you!

General

Mel Chua reported[1] that there was a Zikula hackfest, which will shortly become the standard CMS for all Fedora Docs, Marketing and News.

Speaking of marketing, Karsten Wade posted[2] video on how "building sustainable community in Fedora leads to new innovation and new fun stuff for people to play with." And apparently[3] the Red Hat Wikipedia page[4] could use some updating.

Charles Brej continued[5][6] the Plymouth Theming Guide. If you have ever wanted your startup sequence to include a butterfly flapping its wings across the screen instead of a boring old progress bar, this is the series for you.

Richard Hughes created[7] the shared-color-profiles project to collect ICC profiles for various devices for use with Gnome Color Manager. Also mentioned[8] is a set of inexpensively available targets for use in calibrating any unknown device.

Karel Zak described[9] the new unshare command that is part of util-linux-ng 2.17. "The unshare(1) is a new command line interface to unshare Linux syscall and allows a program to run with some parts of the process execution context unshared from parent." An example shown is hiding a mounted filesystem within one shell session.

Jesse Keating announced[10] the upcoming move of Fedora's package source control system from CVS to Git.

Dave Jones presented[11] a conundrum in packaging the Linux kernel. "The kernel rpm package creates an initramfs file that gets dropped in /boot at install time. Creation of this file is the responsibility of dracut (or mkinitrd in older releases), called from the kernels %post script. Because we want removal of a kernel to also remove its associated initrd file (or else /boot would fill up), we used to list the initramfs file in rpms database as a %ghost file owned by the kernel..."

If you have found that your Gnome icons have disappeared from various places, Juan J. Martínez has[12] your answer. And how to get them back.

Jef Spaleta asked[13] "Can corporations be friendly?" and what that means for MySQL in the context of Oracle's purchase of Sun.

Mark J. Wielaard checked in[14] in support to SystemTap for tracing Java method calls through the call stack.

Virtualization

Daniel Berrange explained[1] how to use CGroups ("a generic mechanism the kernel provides for grouping of processes and applying controls to those groups") with "libvirt and LXC/KVM guests in Fedora 12", another feature that was quietly added to Fedora 12.

And in case you are using VMWare and want to migrate to KVM, Gerard Braad instructed[2] on how to migrate virtual machines between the two.

Daniel Berrange also posted[3] how to use "Routed subnets without NAT for libvirt managed virtual machines in Fedora".

Richard W.M. Jones finished[4] the three-part series on prebuilt distributions. Imagine being able to provision and built a complete virtual machine in 60 seconds...

QualityAssurance

Test Days

There was no Test Day last week, and no Test Day is currently planned for this week. If you would like to propose a main track Test Day for the Fedora 13 cycle, please contact the QA team via email or IRC, or file a ticket in QA Trac[1].

Weekly meetings

The QA group weekly meeting[1] was held on 2009-12-14. The full log is available[2]. Adam Williamson reported that the note on hardware-dependent issues as relating to the release criteria which he had promised to write was done, and added to the blocker bug FAQ[3].

James Laska reported that he was still working on a list of recommendations based on the Fedora 12 retrospective, but expected to have it finished within the next few days.

Adam Williamson gave an update on the release criteria improvement process. As planned, a group had gathered to finalize work on the new criteria at FUDCon, and the new criteria were now officially in place[4]. No-one felt there was significant additional work to do on the criteria themselves for the Fedora 13 cycle.

Adam Williamson gave an update on the privilege escalation policy topic. He had not received any practical feedback or suggestions from the Red Hat security group, so intended to escalate the issue to FESCo without an actual proposed policy. Will Woods noted that he had had some discussions at FUDCon about how to implement AutoQA tests for builds which added or removed setuid binaries, consolehelper configuration files, or PolicyKit policies.

Will Woods and Kamil Paral reported on the progress of the AutoQA project. Will mentioned that he had given a talk on AutoQA at FUDCon, and pointed to the slides[5]. He had returned with several good ideas for future improvements to AutoQA suggested by other participants, and a clearer plan for implementing the much-needed dependency checking test. Kamil said that he had been working on integrating rpmguard as an AutoQA test, and this initial work was available in the 'kparal/rpmguard-integration' git branch. He had posted an email announcement[6] of this, containing some example output.

James Laska noted the work Rui He and Liam Li had been doing on the 'is anaconda broken?' proposal[7]. He also said he was planning a release sprint to revise the release validation test plans for the new release criteria.

The Bugzappers group weekly meeting[8] was held on 2009-12-15. The full log is available[9]. Matej Cepl reported that he was planning to replace the current GreaseMonkey script used to enhance Bugzilla pages for the benefit of triagers with Jetpacks[10]. He asked for volunteers to test the initial versions of the Jetpacks, available from his space[11].

The next QA weekly meeting will be held on 2009-12-21 at 1600 UTC in #fedora-meeting. The next Bugzappers weekly meeting will be held on 2009-12-22 at 1500 UTC in #fedora-meeting.

Increasing the grub timeout

Scott Robbins started a long thread[1] with the suggestion to increase the default timeout for the Fedora boot loader from its current default setting of 0 (which causes the boot loader menu never to be shown at all). There were many opinions on this idea, but the general response was positive enough for Scott to file a feature request[2] on the idea, where some compromises were suggested. Richard Ryniker suggested having the system detect unclean shutdowns and force the boot menu to be displayed on the next boot (much as Windows does). Stewart Adam suggested having grub initially installed with a non-zero timeout, and have firstboot change it to zero on the assumption that a system that can get to firstboot must have a properly configured bootloader.

X.org server testing

Adam Williamson posted a request[1] for group members to test a recent Fedora 12 X.org server build provided by the Fedora X development team, to provide some assurance that it worked acceptably before it would be submitted as a candidate update. Many members submitted useful reports in response, with a generally positive character. However, one potential issue with the nouveau driver emerged thanks to the report of Mike Chambers[2], and was passed back to the developers for investigation.